vanity metrics.. what even is that?
Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look spectacular on the surface but dont necessarily translare to any meaningful business results. This also means that they will not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies. As far as the numbers go, vanity metrics look amazing on paper.
Examples include the number of social media followers or the number of views on a promotional video. These absolutely mean that you are doing something right though, Getting your content viewed organically is already really tough, not to mention that the goal posts are constantly changing,
For some of the best Social Media Managers, they simply haven’t devoted as much time to building their own channels as they have to getting results for their clients. This is actually a good thing,
So the best way to decifer which is which, is to just ask for case studies of their most recent success stories. This is the most obvious way of getting the answers you are looking for, It even offers a bit of a killa bird with one stone scenario,
Now youve opened the lines of communication and overcome the first hurdle.
Here is a lovely example of Vanity Metrics by tableau
A real-world living room example of vanity metrics
Entertainment media and hardware marketing is rife with vanity metric-fueled hype. In a great 2016 example, Microsoft publicly abandoned a common vanity metric of console hardware sales. Instead of reporting on the running total of Xbox sales, Microsoft replaced that public metric with reports on monthly active users of their Xbox Live service. Xbox’s Phil Spencer said about the change, “The nice thing about us selling consoles is your console install base will always go up. But that’s not really a reflection of how healthy your ecosystem is. We focus on the monthly active user base because we know those are [people] making a conscious choice to pick our content, our games, our platform, our service. We want to gauge our success on how happy and engaged those customers are.” In this case, the vanity metric was the running total of console sales. The number would never go down, was a poor indicator of success, and was tied to one-time hardware sales rather than the more lucrative recurring service subscription sales. Pre-change, the vanity metric dictated that a sale resulting in an avid new user counted the same a sale that resulted in an Xbox collecting dust in a living room. While reporting on something as volatile as active subscriptions may seem risky, it became a much more substantial metric and more honest reflection of the health and longevity of service.
Loved this read, its excellent thank you